I also wonder why Francis couldn’t have gone in search of a way out.
“Maybe that way?” he whispers, though I don’t know that, if we spoke in our normal voices, the creatures in the mall could hear us or do anything about us either way. “I think, depending on which supply closet we ran into, your best bet is either going to be that way, or back over there,” he says, pointing to my right and then over my shoulder. It’s not a lot to go on, but I go right, anyway, because I hate going backward.
About ten minutes and twenty yards into my search for a way out, I begin to wonder if it all isn’t some elaborate ruse. If sending me on this search for a way out wasn’t part of Roger’s plan to begin with; if, in fact, I’m the one they all suspect of being the one among us who is infected. And then I wonder, Am I?
But, no, I’m not.
But am I, maybe?
No.
But, maybe?
Then, to put the argument to rest, which is a dumb argument to have with myself in the first place, I perform a quick body check — head, hands, legs, arms, feet — and find myself completely free of scratches, bites, or wounds of any kind, and finally I move on.
At one point, my foot punches through a ceiling tile and I hear a commotion below, a sound of moaning and scrambling and yelping. I don’t know what to expect when I look through the hole left by my foot. An undulating mass of undead bodies, I guess, but even imagining that, the picture doesn’t linger for long before being replaced by the kind of shot you’d see in a movie, a medium-long shot that pulls you out of the mall and into the parking lot, which you can see is surrounded by them, and then farther still, to a long and wide shot of the city — cars abandoned, streets overrun — and then maybe a series of close-up shots in quick succession:
— A woman, screaming, clutching her baby as she runs from a gang of them, so racked with fear she doesn’t realize her baby is already dead, and, worse still, changed or changing into one of them;
— A man on a rooftop, cornered and with no other choice but to jump, to kill himself rather than be eaten and transformed, only to be caught and saved by the very thing he feared;
— At least one hopeful image of a little kid or a couple of little kids with bats or sticks or some strange build-a-better-mousetrap contraption taking out at least one of these monsters;
— And then back to me, gazing in astonished horror at the sight below.
That’s how I imagine it will be.
How it is, looking at the undulating mass of undead bodies below me without the benefit of edits and quick cuts and pans and long shots and fades, is a different kind of unsettling thing altogether.
For one thing, they’re looking right up at me.
For another, they are, each one of them, smiling.
It’s not a pretty sight, the sight of them smiling up at me. Their teeth have a wormy, gray quality to them. A rotted and soft yet somehow still dangerous quality to them.
There is something, let’s say liquid, there is something liquid about their smiles or their teeth or the pulse of them watching me. Something liquid and alive and mesmerizing, and I begin to feel myself pitch forward. And only at the last moment, I grab hold again of the ceiling braces, and everything comes back into focus, and for a second, it looks to me as if they are laughing at me.
I move away from the hole, and I push on, and I shove my foot or sometimes my hand through the ceiling tiles a few more times, and then I come to a wall, a dead end, and I stop.
I wait.
I breathe and listen and breathe some more.
Hearing nothing but the sound of me, I remove a tile and lower my head down through the ceiling, and I want to close my eyes, just in case, but I don’t, and I see the exit, and I see the coast is clear, and I let out my breath.
On my way back, I find Mary.
I hear her before I see her. Or rather, what I hear is the sound of a tile break in half followed by a sharp gasp.
When I find her, her left leg has gone completely through, and she’s sobbing, and I think, She’s a goner, for sure, she’s a goner. But I get to her and cover my hand over her mouth before she can really start to wail, which would lead them right to us, no doubt, and then that much closer to our way out. But she feels my hand on her mouth before she sees it’s me and that makes her bite my hand — though, give her credit, as I don’t know that I’d be desperate enough to bite one of these things if it snuck up on me — and that makes me want to hit her hard in the back of the head, but I don’t. “It’s just me,” I say through gritted teeth, my hand still over her mouth, or in her mouth, however you want to look at it. “It’s me, it’s me, I’ve found the way out,” I say.
It is a way out, I know that for sure. It’s a run, twenty, thirty, forty yards, but straight and with a little coverage, too, so that if you run a little hunched, no one can see you.
What surprises me most about this isn’t that I found a way out, though that is a bit of a shock, but that I found it and tried it, dropping down from the ceiling, landing loudly but safely and without drawing attention to myself, and then, hunching, ran to the glass doors, and pushed them open and then stepped outside into the bright midday sun. The parking lot was full of cars, though I don’t know why I expected it to be empty. I didn’t see anyone — neither people nor monsters — and I shaded my eyes and looked at the long expanse of cars and then over the concrete just past the cars and then down that road farther still, and I thought to myself, Now’s my chance. I could start running and not look back and no one will know, and I’ll be free, or I’ll have a better shot at being free and alive than if I go back inside, than if I go back for those fools still stumbling around the ceiling. But I didn’t run. I could have left, but I didn’t, and here I am, struggling to lift Mary, who doesn’t even know my name, back into the ceiling so I can help her escape, but not just her. Her and Tyrone and Roger and the security guard and those two other guys, or at least one of those two other guys because I’ve decided that the other one has got to be the one among us who is infected, and in the end, that is what surprises me most. I found my way out and didn’t take it.
What happens next seems almost too easy. I point Mary in the right direction and then immediately stumble across those two other guys, and then point them in the right direction. And then I’m back where I started, and it’s unreal that I found my way back at all, let alone this quickly, and I wonder, Is this how your life starts to change? I wonder, Is this how Roger feels about every day? About every decision?
“Francis,” I say.
He turns, startled, and then smiles. “Cowboy,” he says.
“I found the way out. You ready to go home?”
“Hell yeah,” he says. “Just waiting on Roger and the kid.”
And I surprise myself again when I tell him, “Go on. I can handle Tyrone.”
He hesitates, but then I give him a look. It’s a look I’ve never given anyone before. It’s a look that says I got this. Says I’m in charge of some things, and I got this, so go take care of the rest of them, okay? Or says something like that, anyway.
Whatever the look says, Francis buys it and starts off, and then Roger, straining with the weight of Tyrone, calls out, “What’s the holdup?”
I lean down and grab for Tyrone, and he’s not as heavy as I expected him to be, and I lift him up, and the ceiling doesn’t collapse, and his arms don’t slip through my grasp, and I don’t pitch forward under the weight of him, and nothing bad happens, and I let the thought that maybe this is how things will be from now on filter softly into my head. When he’s finally up, I smile at him and pat him gently on the head and tell him something about how brave he’s been, how we’re proud of him, how I’m proud of him, and he smiles back and gives me a “Yeah, me, too,” or a “Thanks, Cowboy,” before I send him on his way.